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Interview With Initiator of DirectX

Posted by Zonk on from the fighting-the-man dept.

Miguel de Icaza writes "There's a great interview from Shacknews with Alex St. John, one of the earlier DirectX / gaming guys. He talks about almost losing his job going against Bill Gates, and talks a bit about the MS development & political process. 'You know why the X on the Xbox is a glowing green X? The original codename for Direct X was the Manhattan Project, because strategically it was an effort to displace Japanese game consoles with PCs and ultimately the Xbox. We called it the Manhattan Project because that was the codename for the program developing the nuclear bomb. We had a glowing radiation logo for the prototype for Direct X, and of course as soon as that got out and the press covered it, it caused a scandal.'"

4 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. WildTangent by zehnra · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He's also the father of WildTangent...ugh.

    1. Re:WildTangent by kinglink · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Something they tend to avoid mentioning. The interview is interesting but it's a first hand account. If I was telling my story to a reporter I'd always wear a cape and fight supervillians in my off time, wait, in fact I already do that!

      I'm glad he's calling vista's feature set stupid, but the thing is it's too fucking late, the system shipped Microsoft's not going to pull these features out because it's a problem and we're going to be stuck with them for 4-5 years.

      And yeah he ran wildtangent a gaming company which is practically malware, I wonder if his hatred of Vista is more based on a more secure install process for the type of files wildtangent used.

  2. Codenames by ESOB · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The original XBox had the codename of Midway. Midway was the battle in the Pacific that essentially guaranteed that Japan could not invade the US. The US sunk all of Japan's main carriers and then started pushing back the Japanese all other fronts. So I guess naming things after the defeat of Japan in WWII is common practice within Microsoft HQ.

  3. The Microsoft way by mzs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Shack: When did you realize what you were getting yourself into, as you say?

    Alex St John: A month or so in, I still didn't know exactly what my job was until one of the guys who hired me said, "Write a strategy for how you would persuade the publishing industry to move to Windows." I spent a lot of time writing documents saying here's what our strategy should be, here's how we could convince companies to sign on, all that. I came in to do my presentation, and I got about three slides into it before I was interrupted by one of the executives saying, "This is all great stuff, you have a perfect plan. Developers who are reasonable should all support it, but what do you do if none of this works." "What do you mean?" "What if in spite of your best efforts, your best arguments, you best relationships, you can't get them to support them. How do you force the industry to support Microsoft anyway?" "Force them? Well, I don't know." "Come back when you have a plan that answers that question."

    That perplexed me for a long time. I'm thinking, "What the hell does he mean, force them? I can't hold a gun to their head, so how do I put all these companies in a position where, regardless of what they see is in their best interest, they have to adopt your technology?" That experience had a major impact on my thinking. I realized that a major part of my job was to figure out how to use technology control to create economic force, or leverage, such that money and business flowed in Microsoft's direction, and people had to go [to them]. That, ultimately, is when I became a "Microsoft guy," when I got that concept.